Mafia 3 and Cities

Mafia 3 might be my new favorite “okay” game, and I hope this review starts some kind of reflection on this annoying assumption that people don’t care to read or learn about “okay” games. Video games have been here for a while now, enough to be a genuine force in entertainment. This stuff makes a ridiculous amount of money, and a good number of people are very happy with that and want to consume endlessly the “best” games. I’m not sure if this trend is imaginary or part of something real that I can’t write about better, but surely the explosion of video essays about masterpieces or overlooked GOTY contenders gets at my general feeling. Back to Mafia 3 however, I think this is easily one of the better open-world games, even if it’s not even close in quality to whatever is the canon of this genre (GTA, Skyrim, Arkham Series and whatever else fits here).

The winning (best-selling) formula for making a virtual city is to follow the formula set in GTA 5, a sort of expansive playground for the player to explore without hindrance or issues. I’m not going to waste my time defending this sort of approach; it clearly works since we keep buying so many games like this, and I have no real issue with the general framework. But these open-world games seem to struggle deeply with making these cities alive or even managing to establish them within their own history. If you’ve seen New York while exploring the PS4 Spider-Man game, I’m not sure I could tell you the difference between that urban city and any of the million other games with urban locations other than the simple fact that one of them has the Statue of Liberty in the background.

New Bordeaux is the reason I was interested in Mafia 3, and it is far and away the most realized city in a modern video game I’ve played. There is a very weird fact within video games that despite the amount of culture and history within American cities, we tend to go to the same tired locations in the same boring contemporary era without fail time and time again. I have to imagine that part of this is cowardice, that to set a game in America before the 80s is to seriously grapple with that big scary monster that is racism.

Mafia 3 is mostly good at that, which in video game terms means that the game has gone far beyond any game I can think of in trying to meaningfully recreate New Orleans in the late sixties, with all the nuances and changes that would need to be made for a video game about a Black Vietnam vet traversing this virtual space. If the sandbox style of city-making is about giving the player no hindrances as they traverse the map, then it is fundamentally incompatible with the lived experience of anyone not white in these cities.

“In our understanding, these spatial imaginaries rest on the double racialization of criminality and space. Because criminality is automatically projected on foreigners, the contrast between the ‘white’ countryside and the ‘Black’ city initially results in an interrelated dichotomy between the ‘safe’ countryside and the ‘unsafe’ city. In the imagination of rural and suburban residents, dangerous foreigners are confined to towns and cities, while the rural and suburban landscape is aligned with ‘whiteness’ and the absence of danger (Agyeman and Spooner 1997: 199). The idea that the village is much safer than the city is thus the spatial effect of the racist assumption that only ‘strangers’ are criminals.”

In a very real sense, Lincoln Clay has to traverse various zones where his presence is immediately understood as a threat. Of the various districts of Mafia 3, the police response time in Frisco Fields, an affluent suburb, is so fast that when I zoned out and stole a car in a garage I thought was hidden I had the entire force blocking the roads. It’s this tension between the freedom of an open-world game and the realities of the 1968 American South that I find most interesting about Mafia 3, and it’s where I wish the game got deeper into.

Lincoln Clay himself as a character is better than most open-world games, but nothing particularly special, he doesn’t have much to say about Vietnam or even politics altogether. But it’s through his interactions with his hometown and the various criminals and contacts of New Bourdeaux that flesh him and the city out. Los Santos in GTA 5 gives the equivalent of a brief mention of racism and class in its city, keeping all of its criticisms and satire within the story and making a city where the streets in the ghetto are as pristine and HD as the streets in downtown.

My personal favorite touch of character to New Bourdeaux is radio personality Remy Duvall, whose show on WBYU genuinely had me stopping the car and pulling over each time an episode came out when you got further into the story. I won’t spoil too much of the game, but Duvall is such a wonderfully written character that it is impossible to not smile whenever he goes on the air to complain about whoever you just killed and to have on guests that are almost a 1 to 1 of contemporary politics today.

Senator Walter Jacobs: Well, the First Amendment allows us freedom of speech, but it doesn’t mean we have to expose our young people to this kind of trash!

Remy Duvall: Exactly.

Jacobs: Now parents should have more say on the matter than some teacher or East Coast educated bureaucrat you know… especially books that teach such self-loathing and revulsion for the people of the South.

Duvall: Well, that right there I think that’s what caused me the most agitation, you know, the notion that we’re somehow keeping these young people from new ideas. What about protecting them from bad ideas! It comes down to this socialistic type of thing is what I think. Why does White Christian America have to become the whipping boy for every half-baked idea and perversion of history out there?

Mafia 3 takes seriously the fact that the South, and maybe America at large, is still reeling from reconstruction. That a huge amount of the playbook of the American Right was written down in opposition to what they considered an existential threat, the end of “White Christian America.”  I think to meaningfully recreate a city, especially from the point of view of an “outsider,” you have to grapple with these tough questions. Kamurocho feels real because the Yakuza games take seriously the problem of homelessness and the rising cost of living, seeing homeless people huddled together in West Park later get kicked out for an office tower is the reality of our modern day.

“The City Designed for Crime: An Analysis of Gameplay in Grand Theft Auto IV” by Cindy Hernandez is one of my favorite pieces of writing on a video game, not just for the amount of detail and thoughtfulness she approaches a game with, but for helping to articulate what I think video game maps can show us about these spaces we already know as familiar.

“The characters within GTA IV also physically live within parodies of their own identities. Because Niko begins his journey in Broker (Brooklyn), there is already an “old world” mentality to its characterization within Liberty City. The separation of the boroughs in Liberty City is very distinct, leading to a story mode that is rich with class anxieties regarding where one lives in Liberty City. The border between Algonquin (Manhattan) and Broker (Brooklyn) in the game is designed to heighten social intensity by emphasizing the water and skyscrapers separating the two boroughs, or what Jacobs’ called a medieval planning format,especially with the presence of the Broker Bridge (Brooklyn Bridge)…... After playing the game, understanding the separation within New York City has spurred questions about identity via its boroughs and neighborhoods. For example, do all New Yorkers feel attachment to Flushing Meadows Park if they haven’t lived in Queens? Do some New Yorkers feel ambivalence towards certain “icons” like Prospect Park because of inaccessibility?”

Video games are still a really cool and new medium, and there are still dope and interesting things being done. But I think we ignore the potential for it to teach and show new understandings and interpretations of cities. I still think we have a long way to go in conceptualizing and making virtual spaces but Mafia 3 will remain in my head as one of the few genuine attempts at realizing a virtual city, warts and all.